A fun little piece of sponsored content dropped into my Facebook feed earlier this week — Dark Horse Comics is making figures based on the Rankin-Bass animated Hobbit of the 1970s. The Hobbit I grew up with. The Hobbit whose songs I know — “The Greatest Adventure,” “That’s What Bilbo Baggins Hates.”
Mock-ups of Dark Horse’s figures of Bilbo Baggins and Gollum were shown at Toyfair in New York back in February. I wasn’t there — I never attended Toyfair in my time with Diamond, though I certainly made marketing materials for the team members who went over the years — but I saw pictures, and they looked lovely.
Absolutely something I would have wanted in my collection — whether I actually bought them is a different matter, and would have depended on price and size — and something I would have enjoyed writing about for PREVIEWS. “Does this sound like John Huston’s Gandalf? No? Let’s keep working at it until it does!”
I’d have worked with Graphics to have order form ads made for these figures, too. They’d have gotten the full court press!
That’s all gone now.
I’m not sad about that. Just wistful. I’d have liked writing about these.